Constitution Inquiry
Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts(4 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord True (Con)
My Lords, all those kinds of discussions certainly benefit from the widest range of opinions. The noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, did raise the issue of a federal approach, and I responded to that. I assure the right reverend Prelate that the Government’s ears are always open.
Lord Howell of Guildford (Con) [V]
My Lords, I fully understand that the idea of a single constitutional commission or inquiry has now been abandoned and replaced by a number of inquiries that are taking place or have taken place into different aspects and branches of our constitutional arrangements, which always need attention. But if we are to offer a better union, could my noble friend explain which body will look into the obvious and fundamental incompatibility between the evident wish of Scotland’s ruling party not just for improved devolution but for the actual sharing or taking of sovereignty and the central constitutional tenet, which we all hold, of the absolute sovereignty of our union Parliament here at Westminster? There is a problem, is there not?
Lord True (Con)
My Lords, many bodies make an input into this debate—I would single out the great work of your Lordships’ Constitution Committee, among others—but I repeat that the Government believe in a strong UK Parliament for a strong United Kingdom. The UK Parliament, which represents the whole of the United Kingdom, is sovereign, and the sharing of sovereignty would run counter to this core element of the UK constitution. The Government are committed to strengthening the union, and there is an earnest of that in the recent summit summoned by my right honourable friend the Prime Minister.
Constitution, Democracy and Human Rights Commission
Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts(4 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord True (Con)
No, my Lords. I do not accept the characterisation of my right honourable friend the Prime Minister by the noble Lord, Lord Tyler. I must say that the Liberal Democrat party has never been slow to come forward with radical changes to the constitution with very little consultation with others.
Lord Howell of Guildford (Con) [V]
My Lords, this is a big canvas but, given the enormous impact of the communications revolution and the ever more powerful media platforms’ monopolies on trust in government, on parliamentary constitutional authority, on the unity of the UK itself and on our future national direction, can we be assured that the commission’s remit when it is set up covers these fundamental issues, as many people are asking for, as well as more conventional areas of constitutional reform?
Lord True (Con)
Aside from the question of whether it be under the ambit of a commission, I believe that my noble friend puts his finger on something that is profoundly important about the way in which the context of politics and government is changing. Without treading on anyone’s feet, I would certainly be interested to hear your Lordships’ opinion on that in a future debate.
European Union (Future Relationship) Bill
Lord Howell of Guildford ExcerptsWednesday 30th December 2020
(4 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Howell of Guildford (Con) [V]
My Lords, I welcome the support for this Bill and the agreement underlying it, as anyone with common sense should surely do. It is plainly an historic and remarkably comprehensive achievement.
I have two quick observations. First, now that we have an agreement on which to build, I plead for a new phase of illusion-dissolving honesty from our leadership, our opinion-formers and our phrase-makers. Could we henceforth take much more care in using the overworked phrase “taking back control”? This is accurate in narrow legal terms in that our Parliament will make our laws and British courts under British judges will implement them. But it is equally obvious that we cannot do exactly what we want in today’s conditions. Unless we wish to become a hermit kingdom, a large number of our laws and rules will be constrained by the realities of an increasingly interdependent and connected planet and by multiple international standards, treaty commitments and solemn agreements.
Therefore, could we perhaps give the “control” mantra a rest, at least until we are clearer as to who exactly is getting back this control? Is it our sovereign Parliament—as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, was urging—the devolved Administrations, the Executive or the proposed EU-UK partnership council and the arbitration bodies set up by the agreement, whose rulings on alignment and fair competition will control us, without their being subject to parliamentary scrutiny, although they will be international law? Some of these questions were rightly raised earlier by the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, chair of the Constitution Committee, of which I am privileged to be a member.
Secondly, the Government constantly get accused of having no coherent vision—no narrative—as we move out of the EU treaty system. Actually, our future narrative is there for the telling. The International Trade Secretary, who is doing an excellent job, was rightly calling the other day for a “Pacific mindset”, or an Indo-Pacific mindset, in repositioning the UK in an utterly changed world.
Of course, we need good and settled relations with our nearest neighbours, although a Europe of constant bargaining is what we have to look forward to regionally. However, the bigger, and much faster-growing, markets, are taking shape elsewhere; for instance, in dynamic south-east Asia and in parts of the Commonwealth network, where investment is now being sucked away from China and where most future world growth in both goods and services lies.
In a networked world and in this hyper-connected age, the whole nature of global trade has changed, the distribution of power has changed, the nature of security threats has changed, and the very texture and character of international relations have changed. So, in passing this Bill and validating this excellent agreement, please could the tone and phraseology now be updated accordingly to give people an honest and balanced assessment of where we are going and by whom we will be controlled?
Great Britain and Northern Ireland: Access for Goods
Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts(4 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord True (Con)
My Lords, I will write to the noble Lord on his very specific point about labelling. Of course, I acknowledge that there are ongoing discussions in the joint committee, and that that is an issue. But the Government have a range of measures, already taken and in hand, which we have discussed with business, to facilitate GB-NI movement.
Lord Howell of Guildford (Con) [V]
My Lords, but is not unfettered trade access what we want, what we have always wanted all along and what the withdrawal agreement guarantees, both for trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland—with a few minor checks—and of course trade between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic? We are committed to all these things. Does my noble friend agree that, if President-elect Biden seeks reassurance against the destabilisation of the Northern Ireland peace process—reassurance that we all want—it is the European Union authorities and negotiators in Brussels who are his best port of call and whom he should be ringing?
Lord True (Con)
My Lords, I will not follow the noble Lord into international diplomacy. What I will say is what I said with some force to the House on Monday: this Government are absolutely dedicated to the Belfast/Good Friday agreement. That agreement has east-west as well as north-south aspects, and the rejection of the unfettered access commitment by your Lordships’ House was deeply unhelpful.
Constitution, Democracy and Rights Commission
Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts(5 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Howell of Guildford (Con) [V]
My Lords, further to the question put by my noble friend Lord Strathclyde, will the proposed commission look at the relationship between the Supreme Court and Parliament? If so, will it look in particular at the recent controversial court judgment on interim custody orders in Northern Ireland and exactly who signed them back in the 1970s, given that the judgment seemed to ignore completely the clear wishes and intentions of Parliament, to misunderstand the normal workings of ministerial and departmental government and to take no account of the practicalities of direct rule administration in Belfast at the time?
Lord True
My Lords, my noble friend has great and direct experience of this issue. Obviously, the Government will look closely at the outcome of that judgment. I regret that, as far as the commission is concerned, I cannot add anything to my prior answers on its scope and composition. I assure the noble Lord that the Government will proceed with care and consideration.
Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011
Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts(5 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord True [V]
My Lords, the Government remain absolutely committed to replacing the Act, and I totally agree with the noble Baroness about its impact. We all lived those days, months and years, and we do not wish to see a recurrence.
Lord Howell of Guildford (Con) [V]
My Lords, this Act has clearly served Parliament badly but I worry that we are getting too many reviews and commissions confused together. Bearing in mind that many other parliaments around the world have a fixed term and that we are in a completely new age from the point of view of the electorate, who are now digitally empowered, is not the length of parliamentary Sessions a prime subject for the constitutional commission? Should not the review of the workings of this Act somehow be worked into the commission, where we will look closely at the effectiveness and functioning of Parliament, which has not been too good in the past and where people are now looking for a very much more effective and stronger performance?
Lord True [V]
My Lords, again, my noble friend makes important points. It is certainly the Government’s intention to improve electoral procedures—separate announcements have been made on that—but Section 7 of the Act lays specific duties on the Prime Minister, and the Government must observe the law of the land.
Beyond Brexit (European Union Committee Report)
Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts(5 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)
My Lords, I am the first to acknowledge the excellent work of our EU committees and their reports, under both my noble friend Lord Boswell and the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull. However, in the case of this report and as we come to the end of this debate—it is not really a debate at all, but a series of statements—I have to register my profound disappointment. The strong commitment in the report for scrutiny both during the transformation period and in the future is admirable, but my disappointment can be summed up in a single sentence. Neither the Committee on the Future Relationship with the European Union nor this report takes any account whatever of the fast-changing events and trends on the other side of the channel, within the EU and its institutions.
Everyone acknowledges that Brexit will profoundly reshape the EU, and many European leaders and thinkers accept that the EU needs fundamental reform, having been created in the pre-digital age. Many also see that these changes are going on fast anyway, regardless of whether officials in Brussels recognise them. Treating the EU as an unchanging monolith, as a hierarchy, will take our future relations straight into a brick wall. This is over and above the major effects on the EU of the current pandemic crisis, which themselves will have considerable long-term impact on the whole EU structure and the relations between member states and the central authorities.
These enormous forces of change in Europe long predate this crisis and will continue long after it has subsided. My question to the Minister is: when are we really going to address them?
EU: Future Relationship
Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts(5 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)
I warmly welcome my noble friend to his new role, and I warmly welcome the comments he has just made and the whole tone of his speech, particularly its emphasis on the principles of our co-operation with the rest of Europe—in a sense, our European policy for the decades ahead. Does he accept that the Statement might have benefited from a description of what is going on in the EU, where radical change is under way? It is adjusting to a completely new style and emphasis in the digital age. Would he applaud a statement from the 19th century and the famous statesman Leopold von Ranke that
“the union of all depends on the independence of each”?
If we stick to that principle, old though it may be, we will be able to influence our Europe—which we still belong to—constructively in the future, along his lines.
Lord True
I thank my noble friend and agree with him, but this Government are not going to lecture the European Union on how it should manage its own home. We respect their right, as 27 sovereign nations, to determine their own future, but the points that my noble friend made are germane and important. We will, and I personally will, bear them all in mind.
G20 Summit
Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts(6 years ago)
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Lord Howell of Guildford
To ask Her Majesty’s Government, following the recent G20 Summit in Osaka, Japan, and the letter relating to the summit from the International Relations Committee to the Prime Minister, dated 13 June, which outcomes they judge to be of most importance for the safeguarding and furtherance of Britain’s national interests.
Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)
My Lords, I declare my interests as listed in the register and in particular that I advise two major Japanese companies.
This debate arises from a short inquiry by your Lordships’ International Relations Committee, of which I was then chairman, and a subsequent memorandum to the Prime Minister before she set off for the G20 meeting in Osaka, Japan, 10 days or so ago. The G20 meeting is supposed to co-ordinate responses to the tensions in world affairs and to take an overview of all the disruptive forces of change sweeping the globe—and, as I think is generally agreed nowadays, to do so with rather more relevance than the old G7 in modern conditions. Frankly, it does not look as though much co-ordination or overviewing went on this time in Osaka.
When she returned, the Prime Minister was subjected to two full hours of questioning on the G20 in the other place—incidentally, a longer time than was allocated for the whole of our debate this evening—and that of course came after her 11-hour flight back from Tokyo. I do not think that that kind of battering treatment of a nation’s chief executive would be allowed or considered even faintly sensible in any other legislature in the world. Anyway, let us hope that the next Prime Minister, not to mention the ranks of Theresa May’s persistent critics, have even half her remarkable stamina.
The questions to her in the other place covered a huge range of topics, from the Chagos Islands to Scotch whisky. Even so, some key issues were completely missed in the exchanges. Therefore, perhaps it would be useful for me to comment first on those key issues—in other words, what should have been there but was not.
I begin with Japan itself, where it all took place. In her Commons Statement, Mrs May mentioned the growing strength of the relationship between the UK and Japan, but in all her questioning no one repeated it or referred to it. That is rather odd because Japan is by far our best friend in north-east Asia, the world’s fastest-growing area. We may not like some aspects of Japan, such as its judiciary or the persistence in whale killing, but it remains the third biggest industrial power in the world, with immense creative momentum, especially as the “globotics” revolution takes hold. We will need it very much in the future.
I have argued for 30 years that our foreign policy experts should take the Japan connection much more seriously and creatively. Osaka should have been—and I hope that in the sidelines, it was—a golden opportunity to carry forward our defence and security links, as well as our trading ties with Japan and all Asia, with the new networks of trade and investment that are rapidly developing there.
Then there is our China policy. The G20 coverage was dominated by the US-China trade wrangles, but it is our interests that badly need developing and clarifying. America is not going to do that for us. Unlike America, we do not see China as the enemy. Of course, we have to treat our China connections with great caution, but this nation will stand or fall by its agility in balancing its connections with both China and America and not by being trodden flat between the two in the totally new pattern of world power that has now emerged, nor simply by clinging to the coat-tails of Trump’s America all the time, as some of the shallower columnists in the media keep urging. I hope that is not what we were doing last week in taking over the Iranian oil tanker in Gibraltar that was bound for Syria, and that it is not what the new Prime Minister will do; that would not be the right pattern to follow.
There are aspects of China in the human rights area that we rightly dislike—some nasty stories circulate about its treatment of minorities, especially the Uighurs and their culture—but there should be no illusions: China is now a major global player as a supplier, a market, an influence and an investor across the world and right up to our own front door. It is the world’s largest trading nation. Its R&D expenditure soared to $298 billion last year, the second highest in the world. I believe that we can box much cleverer with China than the hot and cold, unpredictable views that come from Washington, using track-two and three diplomacy to the full on issues such as Huawei, 5G and the East/West technology split that some Americans apparently want to see and which at all costs we should avoid.
Hong Kong was not actually mentioned in the communiqué or the report back to the other place but it is certainly right for us to insist on Hong Kong freedoms under the law, including the freedom to protest, the principles of the 1984 Sino-British declaration and so on. However, the violent physical trashing of the Hong Kong legislature is something else. It is wrong, and in my view we should have been much more forthright in saying so than we have been.
As for the Russians at the G20, Vladimir Putin may not be the nicest of characters, as the Prime Minister’s handshake photo made crystal clear, but undoubtedly he has a super-sharp mind and a mastery of prodding us at our weakest points. Liberalism may not be dead or obsolete in the West, as he claimed, but it is undoubtedly under severe assault from narrower varieties of populist nationalism, coming from both left and right, vastly amplified and empowered by digital communications and pushing Governments all the time inward, towards more protection and reluctance to co-operate internationally in line with the rules-based order.
As for climate concerns, the Prime Minister spoke proudly at Osaka of our Government’s new commitment to zero emissions by 2050. By itself, as everyone knows, this would hardly move the needle in fighting climate change. Indeed, if we manufacture less and import more carbon from overseas, it might actually have the reverse effect. So the key aim has to be, and can only be, through example impact, especially on the really big global emitters: China, India, Russia and the United States. China is going to be decisive in this situation, with 28% of global emissions and rising fast. We need to hear much more about how the example process is actually going to work. Assurances that the big emitters are listening is not enough, and neither is costly virtue-signalling.
The nature of international trade has changed dramatically in the last decade, especially now that trade relations between China and the rest of the world are entering a whole new phase. Much of our thinking about China is badly out of date, as my noble friend Lord O’Neill reminded us as a witness to our committee. I hope we shall hear from him a little later. It is cultural and professional exchange, the creative industries, the newest technologies and soft power networks that are reshaping world commerce, with Asia taking the lead.
In the forums of the world, we are going to have to defend our core ideas much more effectively. We will have to fight for liberal values with new techniques, methods and expressions. We will have to defend international rules and build as fast as we can new types of social and fair capitalism, as they do in Asia, to counter the inchoate pressures of populist extremism that are growing everywhere and are definitely here to stay.
The G20 was—or should have been—a forum in which to make these tasks a lot clearer and to focus on them more vividly, but this time I am not sure that that is what happened. That may be because technology is moving ahead too fast for Governments to keep up, but that is a debate for another day.
Economy: Productivity
Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts(9 years, 3 months ago)
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Lord Bridges of Headley
My Lords, I am bursting with enthusiasm and full of energy to get things done. I cannot claim that this Government will not encounter some of the problems that previous Governments down the ages have encountered when implementing their plans, but I refer the noble Lord to chart 2.B in the National Infrastructure Delivery Plan, published a fortnight ago, which shows that, of the 602 projects that the plan sets out and are in the pipeline, 61% are in construction, 50% will have been completed by 2020-21 and a further 49% will by that point be either under construction or part of an active programme. So we are full of enthusiasm, full of energy and we are getting going.
Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)
Will my noble friend explain to the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, that the Office for National Statistics figures which so worry him may not tell the full story by any means, because they take too little account of the huge output of data and information in the digital age, which now generates more economic value than the whole of global goods trade?
Lord Bridges of Headley
My noble friend makes an extremely good point. Sir Charles Bean recently completed a review of the UK’s economic statistics, and one of his findings was, as my noble friend said, that if the digital economy had been properly taken into account, economic growth would have been one-third to two-thirds of a percentage point higher over the past decade, with similar implications for productivity. However, I stress that that would not explain the UK’s recent poor performance in comparison with other countries, nor why productivity has worsened since the financial crisis, so we are not complacent.